Screen: 'Lolita,' Vladimir Nabokov's Adaptation of His Novel:Sue Lyon and Mason in Leading Roles

By BOSLEY CROWTHER

Published: June 14, 1962

HOW did they ever make a movie of "Lolita?" The answer to that question, posed in the advertisements of the picture, which arrived at the Loew's State and the Murray Hill last night, is as simple as this. They didn't.

They made a movie from a script in which the characters have the same names as the characters in the book, the plot bears a resemblance to the original and some of the incidents are vaguely similar. But the "Lolita" that Vladimir Nabokov wrote as a novel and the "Lolita" he wrote to be a film, directed by Stanley Kubrick, are two conspicuously different things.

In the first place, the character of Lolita, (he perversely precocious child who had such affect on the libido of the middle-aged hero in the book, is not a child in the movie. She looks to be a good 17 years old, possessed of a striking figure and a devilishly haughty teen-age air. The distinction is fine, we will grant you, but she is definitely not a "nymphet." As played by Sue Lyon, a new-comer, she reminds one of Carroll Baker's "Baby Doll."

Right away, this removes the factor of perverted desire that is in the book and renders the passion of the hero more normal and understandable. It also renders the drama more in line with others we have seen. Older men have often pined for younger females. This is nothing new on the screen.

Further, the structure and the climate of the movie are not the same as those of the book. The movie starts with the melodramatic incident that brings the novel to a close, then flashes back to the beginning and tells its story in a decreasingly "humorous vein. Thus the viewer is warned by this weird preface that the ending is going to be grim. The device tends to shade the early satire and pulls the punch from Mr. Nabokov's curious tale.

But once this is said about the movie — and once the reader has been advised not to expect the distractingly sultry climate and sardonic mischievousness of the book — it must be said that Mr. Kubrick has got a lot of fun and frolic in his film. He has also got a bit of pathos and irony toward the end. Unfortunately, there are some strange confusions of style and mood as it moves along.

The best part comes early in the picture when Mr. Nabokov and Mr. Kubrick are making sport of their hero's bug-eyed infatuation with Lolita and his artful circumvention of her mother. Here the satire is somewhat gross but booming, assisted greatly by a wonderfully deft job of comical fumbling by Shelley Winters, who makes the mother a sublimely silly sort, James Mason as the gulping, amorous hero and Peter Sellers as a sly, predacious cad floating around the edges are at their best in this part of the film.

The switch to a more provocative passage or phase is introduced by a sharp paradoxical juxtaposition of humorous and ghoulish images (to which Mr. Kubrick appears partial), which starts the odd romance of man and girl. And from this, again, we are taken through a hauntingly poignant hospital scene, played brilliantly by. Mr. Mason, into the solemn, tedious finish of the tale.

The changes are disconcerting, and Mr. Kubrick inclines to dwell too long over scenes that have slight purpose, such as scenes in which Mr. Sellers does various comical impersonations as the sneaky villain who dogs Mr. Mason's trail. But, for all that, the picture has a rare power, a garbled but often moving push toward an off-beat communication. And Miss Lyon makes a shallow, heartless girl. This is hot the novel "Lolita," but it is a provocative sort of film.